Patrick Kingsley
05/16/2021 14:01
Clarín.com
World
Updated 05/16/2021 2:01 PM
Twenty-seven days before the first rocket was fired from Gaza this week,
a squad of Israeli policemen entered
Jerusalem's
Aqsa Mosque
, pushed Palestinian assistants aside and crossed its vast limestone courtyard.
They then cut the speaker wires that broadcast prayers to the worshipers from four medieval minarets.
It was the night of April 13, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
It was also Memorial Day in Israel, honoring those who died fighting for the country.
The Israeli president was delivering a speech at the Western Wall, a sacred Jewish site below the mosque, and
Israeli officials worried that the prayers would drown him.
The incident was confirmed by six mosque officials, three of whom witnessed it;
Israeli police declined to comment.
In the outside world, it was barely registered.
But in retrospect,
the police raid on the mosque
, one of Islam's holiest places, was one of several actions that led, less than a month later, to the sudden resumption of the war between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that rules the country.
Gaza Strip and the outbreak of civil unrest between Arabs and Jews throughout Israel.
"This was the turning point," said Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, the grand mufti of Jerusalem.
"His actions would cause the situation to deteriorate."
Destruction in Gaza.
Photo EFE
That decline has been far more devastating
, far-reaching and accelerated than anyone imagined.
It has led to the worst violence between Israelis and Palestinians in years, not just in the conflict with Hamas, which has killed at least 145 people in Gaza and 12 in Israel, but in a wave of mob attacks in mixed Arab-Jewish cities. In Israel.
Domino effect
It has sparked riots
in cities in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces killed 11 Palestinians on Friday.
And it has resulted in the firing of rockets into Israel from a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, prompting Jordanians to march into Israel in protest, and prompting Lebanese protesters to briefly cross their southern border with Israel.
The crisis occurred as the Israeli government struggled to survive;
while Hamas, which Israel considers a terrorist group,
sought to expand its role within the Palestinian movement
;
and as a new generation of Palestinians affirmed their own values and goals.
And it was the result of
years of blockades and restrictions in Gaza
, decades of occupation in the West Bank and decades more of discrimination against Arabs within the state of Israel, said Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Israeli Parliament and former president of the World Zionist Organization.
"All the enriched uranium was already in place," he said.
“But you needed a trigger.
And the trigger was the Aqsa mosque
.
"
The launch of missiles from Gaza towards Israel.
AFP photo
Seven years had passed
since the last major conflict with Hamas and 16 years since the last great Palestinian uprising, or intifada.
There were no major riots in Jerusalem when President Donald J. Trump recognized the city as the capital of Israel and nominally moved the US embassy there.
There were no mass protests
after four Arab countries normalized relations with Israel, abandoning a long-standing consensus that they would never do so until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was resolved.
Two months ago,
few in the Israeli military establishment
expected anything like this.
In private briefings, military officials said the greatest threat to Israel
was 1,000 miles away
in Iran, or across the northern border in Lebanon.
The pandemic
When diplomats met in March with the two generals who oversee the administrative aspects of Israeli military affairs in Gaza and the West Bank, they found the couple relaxed about the possibility of significant violence and
celebrating an extended period of relative calm
, according to a senior. foreign diplomat.
who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely.
Gaza was struggling to overcome a wave of coronavirus infections.
Most of the major Palestinian political factions, including Hamas, were looking toward the Palestinian legislative elections scheduled for March, the first in 15 years.
And in Gaza, where the Israeli blockade has contributed to an unemployment rate of around 50 percent, Hamas's popularity was waning as Palestinians spoke more and more of the need to prioritize the economy over war.
The mood began to change in April.
In Tel AViv, the missile shield.
AFP photo
The prayers in Aqsa for the first night of Ramadan on April 13 occurred as Israeli President Reuven Rivlin was delivering his speech nearby.
The mosque's leadership, which is overseen by the Jordanian government, had
rejected an Israeli request
to avoid transmitting prayers during the speech, viewing the request as disrespectful, a mosque's public affairs official said.
So that night, the police raided the mosque and turned off the loudspeakers.
"Without a doubt," said Sheikh Sabri, "it was
clear to us that the Israeli police wanted to desecrate
the Aqsa mosque and the holy month of Ramadan."
A spokesman for the president denied that the speakers were turned off, but later said they would check again.
In another year, the episode could have been quickly forgotten.
But last month,
several factors
suddenly and unexpectedly
aligned
that allowed this snub to escalate into a major showdown.
A resurgence of a
sense of national identity
among Palestinian youth found expression not only in resistance to a series of raids in Al Aqsa, but also in protests over the plight of six Palestinian families facing expulsion from their homes.
The perceived need to placate an increasingly assertive far right gave Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's acting prime minister, little incentive to calm the waters.
A sudden Palestinian political vacuum and a popular protest it could adopt gave Hamas a chance to
show its muscles.
Israel unprepared
These changes in Palestinian dynamics caught Israel by surprise.
The Israelis
had been complacent
, fueled by more than a decade of far-right governments that treated Palestinian demands for equality and statehood as a problem that needed to be contained, not resolved.
"We have to wake up," said Ami Ayalon, former director of the Israeli domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet.
"We have to change the way we understand all of this,
starting with the concept that the status quo is stable."
The loudspeaker incident was followed almost immediately by the police decision to close a popular square in front of the Damascus Gate, one of the main entrances to the Old City of Jerusalem.
Palestinian youth often meet there at night during Ramadan.
A police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said the square was closed to
prevent dangerously large crowds from forming
and to avoid the possibility of violence.
For the Palestinians, it was another insult.
It led to protests, which led to nightly clashes between the police and young people trying to reclaim the space.
In Ashkelon.
Reuters photo
For the police, the protests were a disorder that had to be controlled.
But for many Palestinians, being thrown out of the square was a slight, under which
there were much deeper grievances.
Most of the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and later annexed, are not Israeli citizens by choice, because many say that applying for citizenship would confer legitimacy on an occupying power.
So they can't vote.
Many feel that they are being gradually expelled from Jerusalem.
Restrictions on building permits force them to leave the city or build illegal houses, which
are vulnerable to demolition orders.
So the decision to block the Palestinians from a precious common space compounded the sense of discrimination that many have felt throughout their lives.
"It made me feel like they were trying to remove our presence from the city," said Majed al-Qeimari, a 27-year-old butcher from East Jerusalem.
"
We feel the need to stand up to their faces
and make a point that we are here."
The clashes at the Damascus Gate had repercussions.
Later that week, Palestinian youths began attacking Jews.
Some posted videos on TikTok, a social networking site, which attracted public attention.
And
that soon led to organized Jewish retaliation.
On April 21, just a week after the police raid, a few hundred members of a far-right Jewish group, Lehava, marched through central Jerusalem, chanting
"Death to the Arabs"
and attacking Palestinian passersby.
A group of Jews were filmed attacking a Palestinian home, and others assaulted drivers who were perceived as Palestinians.
Supporters of the far-right Jewish group Lehava
clashed with police
near Jerusalem's Old City last month.
In jerusalem
Foreign diplomats and community leaders tried to persuade the Israeli government to lower the temperature in Jerusalem, at least by reopening the square in front of the Damascus Gate.
But they
found the government distracted and disinterested
, said a person involved in the discussions, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Netanyahu was in the middle of coalition negotiations after an election in March, the fourth in two years, that ended without a clear winner.
To form a coalition, he needed to persuade several far-right lawmakers to join him.
One was Itamar Ben Gvir, a former Lehava lawyer
who advocates for the expulsion of Arab citizens
whom he considers disloyal to Israel, and who until recently hung in his living room a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish extremist who massacred Israel. 29 Palestinians in Hebron.
Netanyahu was accused of pandering to the likes of Ben Gvir and
setting up a crisis
to rally Israelis around his leadership, by allowing tensions to escalate in Jerusalem.
"Netanyahu did not invent the tensions between Jews and Arabs," said Anshel Pfeffer, a political commentator and biographer of the prime minister.
“They have been here since before Israel was founded.
But during his long years in power, he has stoked and
exploited these tensions
for political gain time and again and now he has failed miserably as leader to put out the fire when it broke out. "
Mark Regev, Mr. Netanyahu's senior adviser, rejected that analysis.
"The exact opposite is true," Regev said.
"He has done everything possible to try to make calm prevail."
On April 25, the government relented by allowing Palestinians to gather in front of the Damascus Gate.
But then came a couple of developments that significantly broadened the twist.
First was the impending eviction of the six families from Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
With a final court decision on his case in the first half of May, regular protests took place throughout April, demonstrations that accelerated after the Palestinians made a connection between the events at the Damascus Gate and
the difficult residents' situation.
"What you see now in Sheikh Jarrah or Al Aqsa or Damascus Gate is about getting us out of Jerusalem," said Salah Diab, a community leader in Sheikh Jarrah, whose leg was broken during a recent police raid on his home.
"My neighborhood is just the beginning
.
"
Police said they were responding to the violence of the protesters in Sheikh Jarrah, but the video and images showed that they themselves participated in acts of violence.
As the images began to circulate online, the neighborhood became a meeting point for Palestinians not only in the occupied territories and Israel,
but also among the diaspora.
Discrimination
The experience of families, who had already been displaced from what became Israel in 1948, was something that "
all Palestinians in the diaspora can
relate to," said Jehan Bseiso, a Palestinian poet living in Lebanon.
And he highlighted a piece of legal discrimination: Israeli law allows Jews to claim land in East Jerusalem that was owned by Jews before 1948. But the descendants of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled their homes that year have no legal means to claim their families.
"There is something really triggering and cyclical about seeing people
evicted from their homes
once again," Bseiso said.
"It's very triggering and very, very relatable, even if you're a million miles away."
On April 29, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas canceled the Palestinian elections for fear of a humiliating outcome.
The decision made Abbas look weak.
Hamas saw an opportunity
and began to reposition itself as a militant defender of Jerusalem.
"Hamas thought that by doing so, they
were showing that they were a more capable leadership
for the Palestinians," said Mkhaimar Abusada, a policy expert at Al Azhar University in Gaza City.
On May 4, six days before the war began, Hamas army chief Muhammed Deif issued a rare public statement.
"
This is our final warning
," Deif said.
"If the aggression against our people in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood does not stop immediately, we will not sit idly by."
However, war seemed unlikely.
But then came the most dramatic escalation of all:
a police raid on the Aqsa Mosque
on Friday, May 7.
Police officers armed with tear gas, stun grenades and rubber-tipped bullets stormed the mosque compound shortly after 8 p.m., marking hours of clashes with stone-throwing protesters in which hundreds were injured, the officials said. doctors.
Police said the rock throwers started it;
several faithful said otherwise.
Whoever struck first, the sight of stun grenades and bullets inside the prayer hall of one of the holiest places in Islam, on the last Friday of Ramadan, one of its holiest nights,
was seen as a
grave
insult
to all. Muslims.
"This is about the Judaization of the city of Jerusalem," Sheikh Omar al-Kisswani, another mosque leader, said in an interview hours after the raid.
"This is about dissuading people from going to Al Aqsa."
That set the stage for a dramatic showdown on Monday, May 10.
A final court hearing was set on Sheikh Jarrah to coincide with Jerusalem Day, when Jews celebrate the reunification of Jerusalem, through the capture of East Jerusalem in 1967.
Jewish nationalists often mark
the day by marching through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City and attempting to visit the Temple Mount, the site on which the Aqsa Mosque was built.
The looming combination of that march, tensions over Al Aqsa and the possibility of an eviction order in Sheikh Jarrah seemed to be moving towards something dangerous.
The Israeli government was quick to get the tensions under control
.
The Supreme Court hearing in the eviction case was postponed.
An order prohibited Jews from entering the mosque compound.
But police re-raided the Aqsa mosque early Monday morning after Palestinians stored stones in anticipation of clashes with the police and far-right Jews.
For the second time in three days, stun grenades and rubber-tipped bullets were fired throughout the compound, in scenes that were broadcast around the world.
At the last minute, the government diverted the Jerusalem Day march out of the Muslim Quarter, after receiving an intelligence report
on the risk of escalation if it went ahead.
But that was too little and too late.
By then, the Israeli army had already started ordering civilians to move away from the Gaza perimeter.
Shortly after 6 p.m. on Monday, the rocket fire from Gaza began.
The New York Times
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